How Roseanne made Donald Trump possible

By Tim Stanley

Updated3 April 2018 — 4:35pmfirst published 2 April 2018 — 3:58pm

America is a TV nation. To understand it, you have to immerse yourself in televangelists, game shows and tornado warnings. This is the country that elected a reality star as president - a president who last week telephoned a sitcom actress to congratulate her on her ratings.

They were impressive. The premier of the Roseanne reboot won the largest audience for a network sitcom in three years. Curiously, it fared less well in cities that normally decide a hit - like New York and San Francisco - and outperformed in smaller media markets like Missouri and Oklahoma. "Look at Roseanne - look at her ratings," Trump told a rally. "They were unbelievable. More than 18 million people. And it was about us."

The cast from the Roseanne reboot.Credit:ROBERT TRACHTENBERG

It was. Roseanne Barr has been speaking for the Trump people before they knew they were for Trump, and the success of her show is proof that you don't have to bend your knee to the cultural elites to get an audience.

She started her stand-up career in the Eighties, playing a loud-mouthed, overweight mum. "I have three kids and I've been married 14 years," she'd say, "so I breed well in captivity." The voice was like a cat being thrown about in a cement mixer, but something about it compelled ABC to give her a show in 1988, and Roseanne ran until 1997.

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President Donald Trump waves as he leaves the White House in Washington last month.Credit:Manuel Balce Ceneta

Hitherto, US sitcoms tended to be middle-class, aspirational. By contrast, Roseanne Conner and her husband Dan (John Goodman) were desperate people from Illinois, struggling to get by. I remember as a child watching one affecting scene in which Roseanne landed an interview for an office job. It all went swimmingly until the boss presented her with one of those newfangled computer things and asked if she knew how to use it. "Oh look," said Roseanne, "a microwave with its own organ!" Folk like the Conners were slowly being replaced by robots and foreign workers.

I assumed the Conners were Democrats. They certainly weren't starchy Republicans. But America's cultural politics took an odd turn in the Nineties. The Democrats evolved into a coalition of minorities and elite liberals, which alienated the white working-class, and Americans, once united by their viewing habits, started to watch very different shows from each other.

Democrats lean towards smart, quirky shows like Suits and, curiously, Doctor Who; Republicans prefer gritty crime dramas. And politics, of course, sits downstream from culture, ready to go with the flow. Not only did Trump make his name on a reality show, but Cynthia Nixon, a star of Sex and the City, is now shooting to be New York's next governor.

Roseanne also ran for president. Her obnoxious 2012 campaign, which called for the rich to be beheaded, made it on to the ballot in just three states, but still came in sixth. She says she was Trump before Trump, and she has as good a claim as anyone. Journalist Matt Lewis has argued that just as The Cosby Show (a sitcom about a black doctor) prepared Americans for Obama, so Barr popularised a type of patriotic, uncouth working-class hero that Trump aspires to be.

Roseanne Barr and John Goodman on the new Roseanne.Credit:Adam Rose

We often hear asked "how can the poor vote for a rich crook?" or "how can evangelicals vote for an adulterer"? The answer lies back when life started to became so tough for some Americans, and politics so elitist and ridiculous, that the Trump show seemed more honest. Roseanne is asked in her reboot why she voted for Trump and she explains that he talked about jobs: "We almost lost our house, the way things are going." Her sister replies: "Have you looked at the news? Cos now things are worse." Roseanne shouts back: "Not on the real news."

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Is that Barr speaking or her character? It's unclear, and the blurring of the line is one of the most troubling things about modern America and why you have to watch the TV to understand it. The real Roseanne says that, at the very least, Trump deserves a chance to succeed. If he does win again in 2020, he'll do it by attracting enough support in the middle of the country to eclipse those cities on either coast that for too long have assumed they are the arbiters of taste. Which just happens to be how Barr won her ratings record, too.